On Unequal Power Allocation for Video Communications Using Scalable Video Coding in Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of radio resource allocation with H.264/AVC scalable video coding (SVC) in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. During transmission of SVC-encoded videos in error prone network environments, packet losses of a certain layer may cause a severe reduction of quality or even prevent 1n2 correct decoding of other layers, since SVC layers are highly interdependent. It is generally said that the most important information should be preserved with the highest priority from packet losses. To investigate the validity of such a scheme, we apply unequal radio power allocation for SVC layers in massive MIMO systems. We first show that the error rate changes drastically with respect to transmit power in massive MIMO systems. Then, we conduct simulations to analyze the overall quality in terms of both the traditional peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the structural similarity (SSIM) considering perceived quality. Our results show that layer prioritization in massive MIMO systems is not always beneficial in terms of quality and the content characteristics need to be considered for effective power allocation.